Isn't this a solution to a completely different problem? The issue here is not with ambient light while you're trying to sleep, but rather the bright lights shone into your eyes by various appliances while you're using them messing with your body clock.
f.lux attempts to deal with this by altering the colour temperature of your monitors. Another way might be to simply turn your monitor's brightness down.
So you have badly written software that can't cope with the low resolution that the short-sighted old users insist on having on the small screens you give them?
For example, you can go to jail for denying the holocaust happened...
Isnt it odd that a society that places such value on avoiding historical lies would be pushing to censor history in this case?
I would instead say that german law believes that protecting the identities of reformed criminals provides the greater net benefit to society by allowing them to reintegrate, and that german law believes that preserving the memory of the holocaust will provide the greater net benefit to society by helping to prevent the resurgence of nazism.
This is a cultural difference. In America you value freedom of speech above many other rights, including privacy. In Germany, it is the other way around - Germans value privacy greatly, but do not necessarily think everyone should always be allowed to speak their mind. For example, you can go to jail for denying the holocaust happened... but on the other hand Privacy International acknowledges german privacy safeguards while naming the united states an endemic surveillance society. (source. It seems even Germany is slipping on PI's scales these days...)
They are private facts. The people who hold that information have always been, and will always be, contractually and legally obliged to keep those facts private.
The identity of the murderers isn't just a fact, it's a public fact, part of the public record, established in a public trial.
The main facts remain the same, only the names will be expunged from public access. I would say this is because, once freed, criminals regain a lot of their rights to privacy.
The question is whether government has the right to retroactively rewrite public databases, public records, and public facts. The only possible answer is a resounding "no". Fascist states, dictatorships, and communist states rewrite history; democracies do not.
Oh, you can't just denounce everyone who doesn't share to the your particular viewpoint of an ideal democracy as fascist! Different cultures have different needs. Both viewpoints are trying to achieve an ideal but falling short as realistic governments are bound to.
Anyway, it's not altering history, it's expunging names from the public record to protect people. It's not like they're writing someone else's name into the history books.
This is a tough question.
No, it really isn't
It's just that your particular value system only permits one possible answer, but not everyone shares that system precisely. Disagree if you must, but at the very least you have to agree that in Germany, the german people should be allowed to make their laws as they see fit. Now, American law disagrees with German law. How then do you approach such an international thing as wikipedia? You don't think this is a tough question? The obvious answers all leave a lot to be desired.
Only if you inject someone else. Dr Barry Marshal jointly won the Nobel prize for Medicine in no small part for infecting himself with Helicobacter pylori. Different league of disease, true, but infecting someone isn't necessarily out of the question. I wouldn't be at all surprised if the researcher that proves the effectiveness of this vaccine by injecting themselves with HIV also won a nobel prize, given how many people die from AIDS.
In atoms: Avogadro's number is 6x10^23. 1 mole of iron contains 6x10^23 Fe atoms, and has a mass of 55 grams. So, 2^119 atoms are 2^119/6^23 = 1e12 moles. This means that 2^119 atoms of iron would have a mass of 55 megatonnes. (1 tonne = 10^6g), which is (very roughly) the mass of a solid cube of iron 200 meters to the edge. So, if you take a 200 m cube of iron, the number of atoms in that will be about 2^119. Which is pretty big.
The same math for 2^100.5 makes it roughly equal to the number of atoms in a cube of iron only 3 m across.
Compare that, though, to 2^256: 2^256 = 115792089237316195423570985008687907853269984665640564039457584007913129639936 = 10^77.
This is equal to the number of atoms in a cube of iron one light year (!) across.
So, from 2^256 to 2^119 and then to 2^100.5 are massive steps. But then again, bear in mind that 2^100.5 = 1.8x10^30 is still massive, so no worries as yet.
Unless I made a mistake. My formula from number of atoms to cube size is: ( numberOfAtoms/ (6e23 atoms per mole) * (55 g per mole) / (8 g per cubic cm) ) ^ (1/3). Output in cm.
Ideally, you regain the energy you use rolling up a speed bump by rolling down it again. Not so here.
Nevertheless, I'm coming round to the idea. If you install these in places you'd brake anyway, you're not letting as much of the energy lost while braking go to heat.
I'm not sure I follow the bit about science becoming occultism. I also wasn't trying to make a point about religion. Also, no one was criticising the internet. I just said it was hypocritical to criticise science while reaping its benefits.
I didn't say that. Science doesn't "do" good or evil. Science doesn't act. See first paragraph that you quoted. I also never claimed that the knowledge attained scientifically has only been used in good ways, only that we're ahead. See the paragraph you cut out using ellipses.
Be careful who you talk about evil or who is a hypocrite here.
It is hypocrisy to condemn a process while reaping the benefits of it. That's almost the definition of hypocrisy. I didn't say anyone was evil. Disrespectful, perhaps - but isn't the methodology that has allowed us to achieve our modern way of life worthy of some respect?
You sound like you (and society) have given up on the word already. Don't, it's a good one, worth fighting for. I'm using the word in the way in which scientists use it still. (for, IAAS, as it were)
Plus I don't think the mainstream has accepted the teachings of any religious groups using the word "Science".
This sort of thing infuriates me. Flamebait be damned, this needs saying.
Science is not a cause, nor a goal, or agent. Science is a framework for gaining knowledge while discarding falsehood. That is all. Saying science is the cause of some evil is saying that learning is the cause of some evil.
There are consequences to the knowledge that science unlocks, it is true. Some of these consequences are detrimental, it is true. However, to condemn the best process of learning because some of the things we have learnt have been used in a less than ideal fashion is to condemn all the good things we have learnt through it as well, and on balance, I'd say we're ahead.
And finally, to bitch about science, from the shelter of your science-made walls that house your your electricity-powered home, via quantum mechanical communication equipment, and with you alive in no small part due to a plethora of antibiotics and immunisations - is the worst disrespectful hypocrisy. Next time a doctor saves your life think hard on that.
High end everything else and then crap for video card makes a nice workstation, but it's an insanely underpowered gaming rig.
Everyone knows that, despite Apple's best efforts, Macs are a year behind PCs when it comes to major games anyway. I doubt anybody who's shopping for a gaming rig even gives Apple a second thought.
Not now that you can install windows on them. Gaming on my old MacPro is fantastic - plus I'm not tied to windows for my work. Price isn't so bad (not good, just not terrible) when you get a decent gaming pc AND a high powered workstation - although these new ones could indeed use a bit more graphics power.
The clincher for me (personally, no evangelising here) is the operating system though... To say I've used both windows and mac and prefer the latter would be...erroneous. I do use mac os x (with elegance, the slightest touch, subconsciously if it weren't for the beauty - and I don't mean visually). I can't say I've ever progressed to the level of actually "using" windows... the experience (hah!) is better described as suffering, struggling against, despite years of trying. With windows I get stuff done despite the operating system, but the mac actually speeds my process. If I have to pay through the nose for apple hardware, so be it, as long as I get to keep the operating system
Ok, so I did stray into the evangelising. Sorry. It's just so hard not to...
There is not enough fissile material in the world to supply the world with nuclear power.
Nuclear power is far from green. Consider the waste for one. The effort of mining it.
Normal power plants tend to make the area under the power plants *completely* unusable... I mean, check out all those buildings in the way.
Do you really think that solar power use in a desert will have a more pronounced impact on the environment than using, oh, i don't know, coal power in the rest of the country? Because that's the alternative. Nuclear power plants are cool and useful, but if you do the maths they're not actually as green as you want them to be.
Well, given that the solar constant is 1 kW per square meter, multiply by efficiency, you can work out just what sort of area you need to cover to supply any given site with solar power - and you'll find that barely any of the united states will have to be covered with solar cells. One or two deserts will do.
Storage isn't that big a deal until we collect so much solar power that we can't use it up during the day.
During the day there are massive drains of power because of things like air conditioning or just industrial use that you don't have to worry about storing solar power until you make more than is needed by all those processes.
Well, if you attach your solar cell to a heat sink the same size as the concentrating surface (lens), then you have as much area to dissipate heat over as you have for a normal, non-concentrating panel.
In other words, the ratio of light collecting area to heat emitting area is the same in both cases.
More, actually... solar cells can actually increase in efficiency at higher concentration.
This is part of the main attraction of 3rd generation solar cells, such as multijunction, quantum well or intermediate band cells, which are expensive to make but very very efficient, especially at high concentrations.
Incidentally, there are some companies that already use non-imaging optics as part of their concentrator system, SolFocus being one of them.
You're probably safe from diffuse reflections at those wavelengths. A direct hit on the eye, either directly or from a specular reflection, would be devastating though, and would in all likelihood damage your cornea and perhaps boil part of your vitreous humour.
Aside from eye safety, note that that power beam will happily set fire to things.
Slashdot Mirror
Snow mixes with rain
my mother keeps calling me
by my brother's name
Just claim it's a parody phone and you'll be fine.
Isn't this a solution to a completely different problem? The issue here is not with ambient light while you're trying to sleep, but rather the bright lights shone into your eyes by various appliances while you're using them messing with your body clock.
f.lux attempts to deal with this by altering the colour temperature of your monitors. Another way might be to simply turn your monitor's brightness down.
So you have badly written software that can't cope with the low resolution that the short-sighted old users insist on having on the small screens you give them?
Where do you work? :)
For example, you can go to jail for denying the holocaust happened...
Isnt it odd that a society that places such value on avoiding historical lies would be pushing to censor history in this case?
I would instead say that german law believes that protecting the identities of reformed criminals provides the greater net benefit to society by allowing them to reintegrate, and that german law believes that preserving the memory of the holocaust will provide the greater net benefit to society by helping to prevent the resurgence of nazism.
This is a cultural difference. In America you value freedom of speech above many other rights, including privacy. In Germany, it is the other way around - Germans value privacy greatly, but do not necessarily think everyone should always be allowed to speak their mind. For example, you can go to jail for denying the holocaust happened... but on the other hand Privacy International acknowledges german privacy safeguards while naming the united states an endemic surveillance society. (source. It seems even Germany is slipping on PI's scales these days...)
They are private facts. The people who hold that information have always been, and will always be, contractually and legally obliged to keep those facts private.
The identity of the murderers isn't just a fact, it's a public fact, part of the public record, established in a public trial.
The main facts remain the same, only the names will be expunged from public access. I would say this is because, once freed, criminals regain a lot of their rights to privacy.
The question is whether government has the right to retroactively rewrite public databases, public records, and public facts. The only possible answer is a resounding "no". Fascist states, dictatorships, and communist states rewrite history; democracies do not.
Oh, you can't just denounce everyone who doesn't share to the your particular viewpoint of an ideal democracy as fascist! Different cultures have different needs. Both viewpoints are trying to achieve an ideal but falling short as realistic governments are bound to.
Anyway, it's not altering history, it's expunging names from the public record to protect people. It's not like they're writing someone else's name into the history books.
This is a tough question.
No, it really isn't
It's just that your particular value system only permits one possible answer, but not everyone shares that system precisely. Disagree if you must, but at the very least you have to agree that in Germany, the german people should be allowed to make their laws as they see fit. Now, American law disagrees with German law. How then do you approach such an international thing as wikipedia? You don't think this is a tough question? The obvious answers all leave a lot to be desired.
You would think, wouldn't you? I'm still shocked from when one of my windows using friends discovered they didn't.
Only if you inject someone else. Dr Barry Marshal jointly won the Nobel prize for Medicine in no small part for infecting himself with Helicobacter pylori. Different league of disease, true, but infecting someone isn't necessarily out of the question. I wouldn't be at all surprised if the researcher that proves the effectiveness of this vaccine by injecting themselves with HIV also won a nobel prize, given how many people die from AIDS.
ok, someone needs to check my math and logic because I'm basically asleep at the moment, but:
2^100.5 = 1.8e30
2^119 = 664613997892457936451903530140172288 = 6.6x10^35
In atoms:
Avogadro's number is 6x10^23.
1 mole of iron contains 6x10^23 Fe atoms, and has a mass of 55 grams. So, 2^119 atoms are 2^119/6^23 = 1e12 moles. This means that 2^119 atoms of iron would have a mass of 55 megatonnes. (1 tonne = 10^6g), which is (very roughly) the mass of a solid cube of iron 200 meters to the edge.
So, if you take a 200 m cube of iron, the number of atoms in that will be about 2^119. Which is pretty big.
The same math for 2^100.5 makes it roughly equal to the number of atoms in a cube of iron only 3 m across.
Compare that, though, to 2^256:
2^256 = 115792089237316195423570985008687907853269984665640564039457584007913129639936 = 10^77.
This is equal to the number of atoms in a cube of iron one light year (!) across.
So, from 2^256 to 2^119 and then to 2^100.5 are massive steps. But then again, bear in mind that 2^100.5 = 1.8x10^30 is still massive, so no worries as yet.
Unless I made a mistake. My formula from number of atoms to cube size is: ( numberOfAtoms/ (6e23 atoms per mole) * (55 g per mole) / (8 g per cubic cm) ) ^ (1/3). Output in cm.
Ideally, you regain the energy you use rolling up a speed bump by rolling down it again. Not so here.
Nevertheless, I'm coming round to the idea. If you install these in places you'd brake anyway, you're not letting as much of the energy lost while braking go to heat.
I'm not sure I follow the bit about science becoming occultism. I also wasn't trying to make a point about religion.
Also, no one was criticising the internet. I just said it was hypocritical to criticise science while reaping its benefits.
So science only does good, not evil?
I didn't say that. Science doesn't "do" good or evil. Science doesn't act. See first paragraph that you quoted. I also never claimed that the knowledge attained scientifically has only been used in good ways, only that we're ahead. See the paragraph you cut out using ellipses.
Be careful who you talk about evil or who is a hypocrite here.
It is hypocrisy to condemn a process while reaping the benefits of it. That's almost the definition of hypocrisy. I didn't say anyone was evil. Disrespectful, perhaps - but isn't the methodology that has allowed us to achieve our modern way of life worthy of some respect?
That is all.
...
You sound like you (and society) have given up on the word already. Don't, it's a good one, worth fighting for. I'm using the word in the way in which scientists use it still. (for, IAAS, as it were)
Plus I don't think the mainstream has accepted the teachings of any religious groups using the word "Science".
This sort of thing infuriates me. Flamebait be damned, this needs saying.
Science is not a cause, nor a goal, or agent. Science is a framework for gaining knowledge while discarding falsehood. That is all. Saying science is the cause of some evil is saying that learning is the cause of some evil.
There are consequences to the knowledge that science unlocks, it is true. Some of these consequences are detrimental, it is true. However, to condemn the best process of learning because some of the things we have learnt have been used in a less than ideal fashion is to condemn all the good things we have learnt through it as well, and on balance, I'd say we're ahead.
And finally, to bitch about science, from the shelter of your science-made walls that house your your electricity-powered home, via quantum mechanical communication equipment, and with you alive in no small part due to a plethora of antibiotics and immunisations - is the worst disrespectful hypocrisy. Next time a doctor saves your life think hard on that.
High end everything else and then crap for video card makes a nice workstation, but it's an insanely underpowered gaming rig.
Everyone knows that, despite Apple's best efforts, Macs are a year behind PCs when it comes to major games anyway. I doubt anybody who's shopping for a gaming rig even gives Apple a second thought.
Not now that you can install windows on them. Gaming on my old MacPro is fantastic - plus I'm not tied to windows for my work. Price isn't so bad (not good, just not terrible) when you get a decent gaming pc AND a high powered workstation - although these new ones could indeed use a bit more graphics power.
The clincher for me (personally, no evangelising here) is the operating system though... To say I've used both windows and mac and prefer the latter would be...erroneous. I do use mac os x (with elegance, the slightest touch, subconsciously if it weren't for the beauty - and I don't mean visually). I can't say I've ever progressed to the level of actually "using" windows... the experience (hah!) is better described as suffering, struggling against, despite years of trying. With windows I get stuff done despite the operating system, but the mac actually speeds my process. If I have to pay through the nose for apple hardware, so be it, as long as I get to keep the operating system
Ok, so I did stray into the evangelising. Sorry. It's just so hard not to...
You're already subject to copyright law... it's the law. Having a button labelled "I will obey the law" just makes it seem optional
OK, several things:
There is not enough fissile material in the world to supply the world with nuclear power.
Nuclear power is far from green. Consider the waste for one. The effort of mining it.
Normal power plants tend to make the area under the power plants *completely* unusable... I mean, check out all those buildings in the way.
Do you really think that solar power use in a desert will have a more pronounced impact on the environment than using, oh, i don't know, coal power in the rest of the country? Because that's the alternative. Nuclear power plants are cool and useful, but if you do the maths they're not actually as green as you want them to be.
Well, given that the solar constant is 1 kW per square meter, multiply by efficiency, you can work out just what sort of area you need to cover to supply any given site with solar power - and you'll find that barely any of the united states will have to be covered with solar cells. One or two deserts will do.
Storage isn't that big a deal until we collect so much solar power that we can't use it up during the day.
During the day there are massive drains of power because of things like air conditioning or just industrial use that you don't have to worry about storing solar power until you make more than is needed by all those processes.
Well, if you attach your solar cell to a heat sink the same size as the concentrating surface (lens), then you have as much area to dissipate heat over as you have for a normal, non-concentrating panel.
In other words, the ratio of light collecting area to heat emitting area is the same in both cases.
More, actually... solar cells can actually increase in efficiency at higher concentration.
This is part of the main attraction of 3rd generation solar cells, such as multijunction, quantum well or intermediate band cells, which are expensive to make but very very efficient, especially at high concentrations.
Incidentally, there are some companies that already use non-imaging optics as part of their concentrator system, SolFocus being one of them.
Yup, you caught me out, I'm not a submariner. :-) So, what does really go on down there?
Con Sonar - Crazy Ivan!!
It's interesting and science. Just because it deals with dung doesn't mean it's toilet humor.
Let's review:
idle articles: Stupid people, Cow Urine, only good for a laugh
This article: Science, National Geographic, really quite interesting.
You're probably safe from diffuse reflections at those wavelengths. A direct hit on the eye, either directly or from a specular reflection, would be devastating though, and would in all likelihood damage your cornea and perhaps boil part of your vitreous humour.
Aside from eye safety, note that that power beam will happily set fire to things.